Immanuel Lutheran Church - Benson

Wealth is worthless in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death.
Proverbs 11:4

I love the Bible’s Wisdom Literature!

Wisdom Literature is a specific type of writings that only a few books of the Bible qualify.  But the book of Proverbs is one of them.  If you’ve never spent time with Proverbs, I encourage you to pick up your Bible and check it out.  It’s a great little Old Testament book, and it contains the roots for most of the teachings that Jesus did.

Most ancient Wisdom Literature (from outside the Bible) comes from Plato’s attempt to figure out what “the good life” would look like.  And since the ancient world did not have public schools like we have now, parents and elders of the community had to teach their youth how to behave and live in the world as responsible adults.  And so Wisdom would be passed down from philosopher to parent, and then parent to child.

But the Bible’s Wisdom Literature (primarily Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon) focus not on how to live “the good life” in this world, but how to live the faithful life.  A lot of the wisdom in these books (as well as the wisdom teachings in all the rest of the Bible) would have been counter-cultural even back then, much less now, today.

I mean, look at this proverb.  “Wealth is worthless in the day of wrath…”  Is that even true?  For so many people in our world, wealth is exactly what they want when they are in trouble.  If you have enough money, they think, you can buy yourself out of trouble, or at least delay the consequences. 

But remember that in the Old Testament, the wrath of which they speak is God’s wrath, God’s punishment.  And God is not interested in obtaining your money.  God gave that to you in the first place.  No amount of money will protect any of us from God’s wrath, or the finality of “the day of wrath” (usually interpreted as the day God reclaims the breath of life God gave you - so the day you die).  This simple truth makes fools of us all, doesn’t it?  We all struggle in this life to achieve money, status, things, and then we die.  We act like money and power make all the difference in this life, but in the end it changes nothing.

“But righteousness delivers from death.”  The superstitious will think that this means, “If I’m good enough, I’ll never die.”  But that is nowhere near close to what this means!

First of all, what is righteousness?  Righteousness, as a Biblical concept, is not just being right all the time, nor is it doing good things.  Righteousness is living as we were created to live, in right relationship with God, each other, and all creation.  As such, righteousness is impossible for human beings to achieve.

So who is righteous?  Only the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, who came to save us all from sin and the finality of death.  It is Jesus’ righteousness that we rely on, and we live in relationship with him in order that we can see his righteousness at work in our lives.

But even Jesus’ righteousness will not save us from dying.  Death is a result of sin, and since we all sin (more than we should most days), we will die.  But Jesus’ righteousness will deliver us from death.  Deliverance does not mean “saving from,” but means “carrying through.”  Just as the Israelites were saved from Egypt, delivered through the wilderness to the promised land, we will be saved from this life of evil and sin, delivered through death to eternal life.  Or, just as we trust the USPS to deliver our mail through hundreds of miles, we will be delivered by Jesus Christ into the hands of our loving heavenly Father.

As Martin Luther wrote in the Small Catechism, in his explanation to the second article of the Apostles’ Creed: “At great cost he [Jesus] has saved and redeemed me, a lost and condemned person.  He has freed me from sin, death, and the power of the devil - not with silver or gold, but with his holy and precious blood and his innocent suffering and death.”

Jesus’ innocent suffering and death are the signs we need of his righteousness: that he would live a righteous life even to the point of suffering and crucifixion, so that we might benefit from his death. 

Wealth is ultimately useless to us (although the benefits it can bring to this life are real and good).  What we really need to cultivate is not our financial lives, but our faithful lives, trusting that Jesus’ righteousness will deliver us from this world.

This wisdom will help us, even though to the world, it looks foolish.  After all, this world teaches us to gather us as much money as we can, even to the point of taking it from others.  But Jesus’ righteousness, working in our lives, will lead us to good and true uses for our wealth now and to a trust in Jesus for the rest of our lives!  Pray for that change in all our hearts!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.